


To Be A Candle

by Wecanhaveallthree



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:54:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21820015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wecanhaveallthree/pseuds/Wecanhaveallthree
Summary: Warp travel before the opening of the Great Rift was a difficult endeavour. Now that the Cicatrix Maledictum scars the galaxy, it has become a desperate affair where the lives of the Navigators who guide their voidships through the Sea of Souls are now measured in successful translations rather than years. With their unique gifts, these men and women are irreplaceable servants to the Imperium of Man - and grisly trophies for the daemons of Chaos.
Kudos: 9





	To Be A Candle

Kairan Kullas curses his aching shoulders. He bends at the waist, he sucks in a lungful of thick, coppery air. It’s barely better than drowning, that building pressure at the back of his throat as he breathes, like something hoary and many-limbed is coming up and out of his gullet, as though he could hack up a ball of spiders. But the water would be worse, he has to remind himself as he heaves the oars, as he ignores the burning of exhausted, cramping muscles.

The water would be worse. Worse because he _knows_ it’s alive, and worse because it’s hungry, but not in a clean way, not in a way that would break his neck before it sucks out his marrow.

Red breakers tongue long strips of flaking paint from the thin hull. Giggling waves spatter foam in Kairan’s eyes, salty and hot. He cannot risk raising his hand from the oar to wipe it away even as it scalds his tender flesh, cannot risk even blinking, for if he loses sight of the lighthouse, well, that’s it, that’s the end, though that end will take a long time, an eternity of time. Death, when it comes, will not be clean, it will be screaming, begging agony that will stretch over aeons.

And when they have gobbled him all up, when the last strip of skin is cleaned from the treacherous reefs that are canines in this ocean’s jaw, he would find himself at the journey’s beginning, unaware of the eternal and unavoidable fate that awaited him.

Perhaps it already had. Perhaps it always did.

But there is not a spare thought to spend on such speculation. Kairan’s focus is blinkered, limited to the boat, to the lighthouse, and to the ocean’s animism.

He travels a river of boiling blood, and all the comfortable lies he tells himself - it’s just the setting of the sun, it’s just the refraction of light, it’s just a species of bioluminescent algae - they rattle hollowly, they drop dead into the bottom of his little boat, scattered like dice, like leaves, like husks. For there to be so much blood, so much _pain_ , the world must be wounded unto death. There must be some weeping chasm in the very meat of the cosmos.

Bend to the oars. The old scars open on rough and callused palms, a crimson greeting that eagerly rolls down battered wood to be welcomed by the sea.

Ahead, far ahead, the lighthouse shines in wounded majesty. There are battlements out of sight, balconies and open-air parlours, and when darkness falls and the sun sinks beneath the sea, it will shine, oh, how it will shine, for contrast emboldens, enlivens, empowers. Even the waves still themselves at the tower’s sandy feet, a sea as flat and calm as glass, as reverent as a supplicant humbled beneath the hand of God.

The hull creaks. The oars groan in their sockets. The pressure drops.

The difference is subtle. Insidious. But all of a sudden, something is different. Something has changed, despite remaining the same. Hasn’t it?

Kairan’s head jerks up. He almost missed it. Beneath the pain of abused limbs, beneath the mental and physical exhaustion, he almost missed it. And that lapse will cost, yes, and the price, the price, the price will be bloody and red as the ocean.

The waves roar triumph. And Kairan’s hand, fingers cramping with release, goes from the oar to his face and wrenches--

\--off the respirator, before he drowns.

He is not wrestling a leaking ship through an ocean. He is cocooned within the near-impenetrable bubble of his chambers, the sole sanctuary of an Imperial Navigator aboard a warship underway.

**’Sanctuary. That’s a funny word.’**

Kairan looks up. A face is pressed against the glass. It is Ensign Sulveka with her clear blue eyes, but the angles are wrong. They are pressed into stranger dimensions. There are cracks at the corners where unlight seeps through, tracking corrosive trails down her puffy cheeks. Her misery will crack his shell. His yolks will spill out, all.

 **’Do you know what it means? Let me tell you.’** She licks something thick and viscous from her fingers. Aqueous humour. **’It means safety. From pursuit or danger or persecution. Do you think I would persecute you, Kairan Kullas? No. You follow the light. You love the light, don’t you?’**

‘Yes,’ he croaks, feeling the scream itching in his throat.

**’You follow the light. We follow you. We yearn for the pyre of souls, but we are banished by the Anathema’s greed. But you are a light, too. You are a candle lit from that pyre. You are a fellow traveller. How could we not love you?’**

The hull creaks.

This is the sound a miles-long voidship makes when it is being bent in two, a stick in the hands of a malicious child. Oh, they are falling from the Warp, falling from the bloody river, but this is the space between dreaming and waking where the fluttering of eyelids can be seconds or centuries.

Ensign Sulveka is tracing a sigil on the blistered dome. Kairan has to crane his head to see. It hurts his human eyes, those worked from the fragile materium, but the obsidian blackness that nestles in his forehead’s centre sees something else. It makes sense.

The language of the Warp is desire made real. The word for opening is the same as the act.

 **’Come out, little candle,’** the thing wearing Sulveka’s flesh sighs, **’Don’t be afraid.’**

Her teeth are growing, elongating, but the process is strangely natural. Her incisors puncture the plastek canopy with a kiss.

Kairan can hear the screams, now. His shelled chamber is completely soundproofed, often opaque when the ship is in flight because privacy is one of the few luxuries allowed to him. The daemon was speaking to him on a level other than that which his mortal senses are equipped for - now they register the crescendo of destruction. The ship is dying, and it is not dying well.

He has heard of such things, of course. The Gellar breaches. The new breed of Gellarpox. The difficulty of travelling in this new, darker Imperium. Every age has its superstitions. Each age desperately reaching back for the panacea of the last.

 **’I know a secret,’** Sulveka is saying as the canopy peels back, **’I know how you are made, little candle. I know your wax and tallow. If I set you alight, will you burn, just for me?’**

‘I will not!’ the Navigator shrieks, forcing his third eye shut, his composure melting away. ‘I will give you nothing!’

Sulveka’s hand comes through the canopy. It is a fine hand. Here are the pale patches from las-fire blowback. Here are void-cold scars from mantling actions on the very skin of enemy voidships. Here is how her ring-finger refuses to bend properly, the ligament healing improperly after being shorn by a flechette. Here is the humble signet signifying her meritious conduct at Alonn Nebula, where the Imperial Navy smashed a battle group of the Warmaster’s own.

From breach to Kairan’s sweat-sheathed face is a distance of well over two metres. Yet that fine hand closes the distance easily. It was _there_ , and now it is _here_ , talon-like fingers tilting the Navigator’s chin.

 **’Then shall I take it?’** the voice hums in his ear like old static, ancient radio-waves still haunting the galaxy. **’Shall I replace your wick, little candle? Shall I coil down your throat and nestle in your groin? Shall I fill you with knowledge and glory, and make a paradise of you?’**

The thing that wears Sulveka’s skin is a siren, singing him onto the rocks of apostasy. The words make a brutal sense. What does he owe the Imperium? Nothing. What have they given him but a shackled, stricken life, barely tolerated by society because of his useful mutation. And even then, his kind has ever been insular, ever more concerned with House and status than the lonely shipwreck of their lives.

For a moment, he can almost see it as her fingers scar glyphs into his skin - directing a true warship through the void, its belly full of fine warriors, come to free worlds from the Corpse-Emperor’s mortis grasp. A place where the accident of his birth would be celebrated, not scorned. Freedom beckoned.

Yet, Kairan recalled the oars. He recalled the heaviness of his chest, the lashing of waves, the meaning behind them. He had spent his life ensuring the safety of those men and women who trusted him, who put their whole faith in his experience and skill.

He recalled the lighthouse.

And then the heretic dream was gone. And then Sulveka was burning, screaming, the thing caged within her flesh trying to escape, to flee into a void that it could no longer reach. All around, the daemonic growths were crumbling, the possessed bodies falling, the desperation eased from the command deck’s survivors.

He opened his third eye, and he _saw_.

The boat as cynosure. The lighthouse fixed upon it, that long, blazing sight for a brief, brilliant moment. Under that attention, the lawless inhabitants of the immaterium could not survive. The God-Emperor’s eye, His grand Astronomicon, was a beacon. No creature of the Warp could endure it. So they fled, or they fell, or their essence burned away, leaving ash and burned blood and nothing more.

Before that light, Kairan was as nothing. His personhood, his identity, began to disintegrate into the pyre of souls. The sweet blessing of communion - to be one with the divine -

But it turned away. For even a God cannot be everywhere. And Kairan was left, hollow, hung in his broken shell.

It was a long time before _Ulghart’s Mercy_ was fit to travel again.

It was longer still before the glyphs across the Navigator’s throat faded.

Even after that, when he drew back on the oars, when the spray came for his eyes, he could feel them.

Indelible.

Like fingerprints in wax.


End file.
